I was, until recently, Economics Editor of The Telegraph. You can find my book - 50 Economics Ideas You Really Need to Know - here.

Introducing the Dancesaurus

Economics and dance music might seem pretty strange bedfellows at first. But the more time I have spent with each of them, the more similarities I've realised the two have in common. Granted, you don’t see too many economists getting sweaty to heavy trance in Fabric on an average weekend (or so one would have thought), but the two are inextricably linked in one key facet: the miasmata of jargon and terminology which hang over them. I am convinced they are there largely to alienate outsiders.

Popular: dance music afficionados at London's Liverpool Street station

This struck me recently as I was drawing up the glossary for a book I am writing on economics. My, how I could have done with a similar glossary on dance music when I first encountered it in my teenage years. This was a real issue at the time. Your kudos at school was proportional to the amount of dance music terminology you could stir into the average sentence. And at the centre of all of this are the mass of different classifications for types of dance music.

I knew what I liked, but as to whether it was house, tech house, techno, minimal, progressive or trance music, I hadn’t the foggiest. And although I hardly had the chutzpah to say this to the kids I was trying to impress, really, what is the point in trying to be so prescriptively descriptive? It’s not so different to economics, where the practitioners instead subdivide their obsession into classifications like the Austrian school and Keynesianism rather than deep house or cosmic disco.

Anyway, on this basis, I’ve decided, over the next few weeks, to start putting together a dance music glossary to go alongside the economics one – a dancesaurus, if you will. The idea is to explain precisely what distinguishes each different type of dance and electronic music, and hopefully to provide a few examples. Since my teenage years I have come to a greater understanding of what distinguishes each of these particular sub-stratae of dance – but this is intended to be a collaborative venture, and you will no doubt have your own comments, suggestions and pointers along the way.

I have no qualifications for this, aside from my love for almost all schools of electronica – but that is the way it ought to be. Samuel Johnson was not much more than an obsessive amateur.

My suspicion is that many people are switched off dance music by these alienating walls it needlessly throws up to guard it against outsiders. All schools of thought and creativity suffer this kind of intellectual snobbery but dance, sadly, more than most.

The other idea is to give you a few highlights of what I believe to be the best dance tracks from every corner of the discipline produced in recent years.

And where better to kick off than with the daddy of all dance genres?

House

One ought to begin a dictionary of dance with house music – it is probably the kind of music most people tend to associate with the mainstream electronic scene these days. But where to begin with House? After all, there are so many different types of house music, from funky to deep to tech to balearic (all of which we will cover in separate sections).

But suffice it to say the following: house the bedrock for the large proportion of dance music. Understand a few of its precepts and you can happily bluff your way through even the most hifalutin dance debate.

House evolved from the disco and funk scene in the late 70s and 80s, particularly around Chicago, Detroit and New York and particularly out of the gay scene. In its earliest incarnations it was effectively souped-up disco, with a heavier drum kick and more thump in the bass.

Two forefathers of this early post-disco scene worth noting are Tom Moulton and Larry Levan. The former was a record producer whose real innovation was that he pioneered the 12” mix. Since the Beatles’ day, most singles, with a few exceptions, tended to be shortish versions of a few minutes. On his mixes, Moulton lengthened the tracks out to six, seven, eight, nine minutes. Listen to his version of Orlando Riva Sound's Moonboots. The track lasts well over 9 minutes, it evolves, layer piling upon layer after every 32 bar sequence. This pattern is precisely the one that still sits behind house music today.

Although he could also claim a living as a producer (with mixes such as Taana Gardener’s Heartbeat, Larry Levan’s bigger claim is to have been perhaps the first real dance DJ. Before his nights at the Paradise Garage nightclub in New York, there simply weren’t proper dance nights as we would know them today. Like many of late disco and early house’s pioneers, Levan was black, openly gay, and something of a character. He died of AIDS in 1992.

His mixing style was hardly what we would expect from a house DJ today. He did not beatmatch, instead fading one record into another, but he remains one of the godfathers of modern dance.

But whereas disco used electronic instruments – synths and drum machines – as decoration and to pad out the vocal-driven tunes, house music stripped out much of the other niceties and focused far more on these instruments. The point was not to avoid repetition, but to seize on it: the hypnotic effect of the beats, the timbre and the melody floating over it were the very raison d’etre of the music. Sniff as you may, from this point of view, house and dance were merely the latest descendants of the earliest music of all – rhythmic tribal drum beats.

Anyway, key to this hypnosis is the very backbone of house music: the four to the floor rhythm. Very simply this is the 4/4 rhythm which makes up most of the popular music canon (four beats in the bar). All four to the floor means is that there is a big beat – usually from a deep kick drum – in every beat of the bar. Listen to Joris Voorn’s remix of Robert Babicz’s Dark Flower, one of the big house tracks from last year. It starts with a good few bars of four-on-the-floor drum machine beats before the tune kicks in. You’re right if you think this is taking repetitiveness a step too far: those beats are designed to give the DJ some time to bring the record in seamlessly.

Anyway, house music is usually relatively fast-paced, with anything from around 117 or so to 135 beats per minute (bpm). That Voorn remix was 126bpm.

As we established at the start, house music is perhaps the most varied and mottled of all dance genres, but if you bear in mind these three rules: the four on the floor rhythm, the tastes and hints of soul and disco and the use of electronic beats and synths, you can wade your way through most of the stuff.

Let’s finish by mentioning one of the earliest and most enduring of house’s heroes, Frankie Knuckles. This New York and Chicago DJ was a contemporary of Levan’s in the early days of that disco-house crossover, but distinguished himself by developing into one of the most influential pure house producers as well. His 1987 classic Your Love is a case in point. Again it is four on the floor (at just over 117bpm), but in this case it begins with an arpeggio that forms the centerpoint of the tune. The beat and snare drum kick in later. Knuckes is still active today. One of my favourite recent remixes of his is his version of Hercules and Love Affair’s track Blind.

A quick postscript. This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive guide, merely something to give those who may be unfamiliar with the lamentably under-appreciated world of dance a little taster – so there will be far more gaps than I could ever care to cover. However, my aim is to try to cover as much ground as possible in the coming weeks. Please do comment on anything you would point people towards.